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User experience: all things, great and small

I’ve been on the job in Web Services for a few weeks now, and delving into usability on a several projects. One of the things I’m enjoying is the opportunity to examine projects from a big picture level down to minor details, and to extrapolate from details back up to the view from 10,000 feet.

For example, the University Police Department is about to start selling temporary parking permits online. At first, I was thinking about the project on a detail level - two headings, two paragraphs, two links for on a webpage for people to buy either a visitors permit or a staff/faculty permit.

With that destination in mind, I started thinking about how people might wind up on this webpage. Perhaps they are local community members visiting campus for an event at the World Theater or a basketball game. Perhaps they are the parents of an incoming freshman, up for the weekend to get them moved into their residence hall. Maybe they are an adjunct faculty member on campus just two afternoons per week to teach.

These user stories helped me generate a list of information pathways across the CSUMB.EDU website that we would need to create to help users find this new page and purchase their temporary parking permits. I also thought about non-digital pathways, such as signs or stickers on the existing parking permit dispensers in the lots.

As I traced these info pathways back to the parking permit page, I started to wonder how that page fit within the existing parking site. A survey of the site content revealed several other possible tasks a user might might want to complete on the site, such as pay for a parking citation or request a review of a disputed citation. These actions were buried among a plethora of other information about parking regulations and policies.

I decided to conduct a quick card sort to see if I could reorganize the content in a way that highlighted these tasks, while still keeping the regulation and policy information visible. Based on the card sort, I threw together some wireframe mockups of a new site structure for the police department to consider.

The next step would be to test the new organization and feature with actual users, either on the site or using the wireframes and see if they can complete tasks such as purchase a temporary permit, find how much a motorcycle permit would cost, or determine if they can leave their car in the library parking lot overnight.

To echo a point made by Tim R. Todish in his post UX Is Not A Verb, user experience is a holistic process. We need to look at both the big picture and the details, and the process that brings the user from one to the other.

Comments

A link to the parking permit page needs to be on every event page (sports, Panetta lecture, etc.) or other reason (move my student in) page so that it is convenient for the visitor to purchase the parking pass and avoid getting a $45 ticket.

Switching the body text to a sans serif font increases legibility, which is a measure of how easy it is to distinguish one letter from another. Characters in a sans serif typeface don’t have the tails that serif typeface characters have, which adds space between characters making them easier to read.

Changing the header font to a wider sans serif typeface improves legibility because header characters are no longer compressed, which makes characters difficult to read. We also adjusted the font size of all headers to improve readability, which refers to how easy it is to read words, phrases, blocks of copy such as a book. With…

On Monday, May 22, 2017, Web Services will improve its editor used to create content in csumb.edu.

This will be the first significant improvement to the editor since we launched the last redesign in February 2015.

In addition, we will provide some significant updates to how we create and display key elements, including:Improving how events get made, shared across campus, and displayed on the page.Enabling the ability to "clip" content from one CSUMB site and used on another.Improving how news is displayed on a page.Introducing several new content blocks that will provide more functionality.
Test the new editor
You can test the new editor on a separate site with duplicated content. Our internal user experience team is testing as well and we encourage you to play with it until it breaks. Then tell us about it at webservices@csumb.edu

We will also hold presentations at upcoming Technology Open Labs starting May 5 and running through May 19. Each lab will hold a presentation at …

Coming on Monday, May 22, when we go live with the new editor , you will see a new editing block called “clipping.”

You will be able to clip individual blocks on a page and insert them into your own page. This allows you to publish content that belongs to someone else, and when they update it, the content updates on your page as well.

Screenshots
To start clipping start by adding the clipping block to the page where you want the content of another page.

After adding the clipping block, begin clipping by clicking the begin clipping button.

After clicking "Begin clipping" you will now be in clipping mode. You can navigate to the page with the content you want to clip by using the site's navigation or if you already know the URL you can enter the full URL.

When you are on the page you clip by clicking the "clip part of this page" button to be able to select the blocks you want to clip from the page.